As our blogs grow to become businesses, and then become our main source of income, it is worth remembering that fortunes do not always go one way.

It is easy to get screwed through no fault of your own:

Google Rankings tank

Advertising prices you sell are cut

Advertising prices you pay suddenly increase

Bans, penalties, quality scores

Crashes, data loss and hacks

and so on

Darren Rowse once told me his problogger empire was nearly stalled before it started when he lost three quarters of his Google traffic overnight. I think he still doesn’t know why it happened, it just came back a couple of months later.

Can you imagine losing three quarters of your traffic and therefore three quarters of your income?

This is why you should not give up the day job until you have sufficient budget to ride out any problems that might crop up.

You must have a safety net in place. Plan for the worst and hope for the best!

This is why I don’t recommend most affiliate sites. Unless they are MASSIVE in size like cj or linkshare there is to great a risk. The most successful of bloggers that I have met made money in three ways, residual income (get paid monthly for account/renewal services like netflix), rebranding/reselling software and ebooks, or selling advertising space!

Also it seems to me most bloggers don’t buy keywords for marketing. If they do they are foolish and won’t make much. Thats a practice affiliate marketers do, not bloggers! Your blog is not something you can sell, only the products within it are, so why pay to advertise it in such a way?

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